WM managed MDI (was Re: Three different tab implementations)

[Lubos Lunak]

On Tuesday 04 of February 2003 08:25, falk.brettschneider at gmx.de wrote:
> You wrote:
> > kSirc has a generic interface for the creating the top level mode, right
> > now it does the SDI mode and Tabbed modes.  People want both, and I'm
> > still not pleased with all the features and would like to try a create a
> > new 3rd one.
>
> Your effort for a library would be doubled effort.
> There is the QextMDI library, already. Everything is implemented and tested
> there. Just load KDevelop-2.1 or KBear and see how it behaves and looks.
> QextMDI is generic. In general, you just inherit the mainwindow from
> QextMdiMainFrm, set the MDI mode (Tabbed, Win32-MDI, Toplevel, and
> partially SDI) via set...-method, and then embed your views with
> addWindow(...some hints for placing or docking...). Nothing is easier than
> that.
>
> > The WM supporting tabbed/mdi modes is a really neat idea, but only KDEs
> > WM would support it.

 How do you know?

> > That's simply not acceptable!
> > I want my app to be
> > useable in as many environments as possible.THIS IS VERY RIGHT.

 I didn't say the app would be necessarily unusable without the supporting WM. 
Perhaps it would be less usable than with the WM support, but since when are 
toplevel windows unusable?

>
> If there was WM support for MDI, I would love it since it's a great
> approach. But there always must be a fall back solution for the case that
> there isn't a WM supporting the fancy MDI features. Otherwise I will not
> port KDevelop over to the new approach.

 Is QextMDI the same as the KDockWidget* classes in kdeui or are those 
different?

> So in my opinion a generic lib in
> kdelibs is necessary.

 As I already said, it would be necessary for the WM approach too, it just 
would be probably smaller. Maybe simply QextMDI should be simply used, and be 
extended to the WM way.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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